Stray Hawkeye

I wonder when it will be that when a cartoon character gets an idea, a CFL will appear over its head instead of an incandescent light bulb?

Several ideas this week, all around efficiency and energy:

• Make an electric powered motorcycle.  Batteries / electric engines can give a lot of torque immediately, which bikers seem to like.  Motorcycles don’t have to carry all the extra weight that cars do for safety mechanisms.  And they generally already tend to be a secondary vehicle for short trips, which seems like it would be an ideal niche to start getting consumers to try electric on a large scale.  Batteries also tend to suffer in cold climates and really cold weather – again, not a problem for motorcycles.
• Use the heat absorbed by roads during the day to generate electricity.  If you can absorb it to use it for energy and keep the roads at a more steady temperature, you’ll have less plowing/scraping wearing on the road, and less buckling and overall less stress on the material.  Use the heat they retain into the evening and the cool they retain into the morning as a sort of geothermal pump or Stirling engine, or something.  This would also help to reduce the heat island effect that city centers have.
• Use the snow on the side of a mountain to reflect the sun onto a specific point as a solar concentrater.  You could potentially put a giant mylar type sheet over the whole area too to reflect more light.  Use a Stirling engine to take advantage of the difference in heat between the heat from the concentrated sun and the cold of the surrounding air.
• Put heat insulators below the burners on stoves so you don’t just heat the air around the coil – force all of the heat up to the surface of the pan, so all of it has to transfer away that way.  Be able to adjust the size of the surface that is being heated so you get full contact with the whole pan, no more no less, and, that way you don’t need several different sized burners / parts.  Make the are area of the surface that is being heated light up so people know right where to put the pan.  Or even better yet, have a sensor that can tell where the pan is and how big it is, and just heat that area.

Make a refrigerator that consists of several horizontal draws, kind of like a clothes dresser. This would keep the cold air in better when you open it because the cold air would attempt to go down, but is stuck in the drawer, so it can’t pour out the bottom like in a normal fridge. It would also only expose a small amount to the fridge to heat, so when you open it, at worst you’re only letting out about a fifth of the cold air. Air could circulate between drawers through the rear of each, allowing for one cooling unit, and each could be sealed off pretty simply when they open.

This design would also make it easier to clean (take out one drawer at a time without needing to let the whole thing warm up). It would also help eliminate the waste of having empty space at the back of shelves, and letting cold air out as you try to dig to the back of a shelf looking for something.

You could also then adapt the idea so that the fridge could be more horizontal that vertical (maybe 6 feet wide with 3 columns of drawers, and a couple of feet tall) so you wouldn’t need to bend down to get to the bottom, or stand on your tip toes to see the back of the top shelf.  This would take up some valuable counter level space in the kitchen (or could be just below counter level, as the food would be in drawers that you would still want to look down into), but the fridge is easily the most accessed part of any kitchen (except maybe the sink), so I think it justifies the space it would take.

It would also keep kids and pets from attempting to climb into the fridge every time you open it.